Trading Places
Trading Places is a 1983 American comedy film directed by John Landis, with a screenplay by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod. Starring Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche, Denholm Elliott, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the film tells the story of an upper-class commodities broker (Aykroyd) and a poor street hustler (Murphy) whose lives cross when they are unwittingly made the subject of an elaborate bet to test how each man will perform when their life circumstances are swapped.
Plot
Brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke own a commodities brokerage firm, Duke & Duke Commodity Brokers, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Holding opposing views on the issue of nature versus nurture, they make a wager and agree to conduct an experiment—switching the lives of two people on opposite sides of the social hierarchy and observing the results. They witness an encounter between their managing director—the well-mannered and educated Louis WinthorpeIII, engaged to the Dukes' grandniece Penelope—and poor black street hustler Billy Ray Valentine; Valentine is arrested at Winthorpe's insistence after the latter assumes he is being robbed. The Dukes decide to use them for their experiment.
Cast
- Al Franken
- Alfred Drake
- Avon Long
- Barry Dennen
- Bill Cobbs
- Bo Diddley
- Dan Aykroyd
- Denholm Elliott
- Don Ameche
- Eddie Jones
- Eddie Murphy
- Frank Oz
- Giancarlo Esposito
- James Eckhouse
- Jamie Lee Curtis
- Jim Belushi
- John Bedford Lloyd
- Kelly Curtis
- Paul Gleason
- Philip Bosco
- Ralph Bellamy
- Robert Curtis Brown
- Robert Earl Jones
- Ron Taylor
- Tom Davis
- Tom Mardirosian